Hardware

Question

Flash drive Damage. Any revival skills or hints?

I bought an original 2GB DataBar flash drive two years ago and i have been enjoying it ever since until today when i inserted it into a computer and the OS saw its memory size as 120KB, practically empty. I checked further and noticed 0kb memory space due to an absence of physhical partition. What do i do to revive it? I already did somethings i tot would work but all to no avail. Things like formatting, trying it on different computers, scandisk and so on but it still remained the same. It's really urgent, pls help.

All Answers

Ouch! Here are some tools...

Unfortunately, USB flash drives are not a failsafe way to store data. Because they are so portable, they are exposed to and can be affected by many outside conditions. A flash drive can loose partition information and/or lose data by it being exposed to strong magnetic fields, static charges, shock, water, extreme heat, extreme cold, and other factors including (many believe) x-ray exposure. In some cases, data loss can be attributed to poor design and circuitry in the memory stick itself.

Now... what to do when you can no longer access data on a memory stick...

First of all, DO NOT reformat the drive. This will most likely overwrite existing files making them un-recoverable. Also do not add any more files to the drive for the same reason. Set the drive aside and then install a data recovery program to your computer.

There are plenty of excellent data recovery programs available that will work for USB drives. However, you may have to try several to see which one works the best.

(by your post, it sounds like you may have already reformatted your drive. Don't give up. I would still try a few recovery tools to see if they can salvage anything)

Here are some freeware options:

Smart Data Recovery:http://tinyurl.com/2kcsmmThis one worked for me a few times. They also have a version for U3 Flash Drives.

[It is greatly appreciated if you tag all useful responses as 'Helpful' by opening those posts and clicking the 'Mark Helpful' button at the bottom. That way, people with a similar situation in the future will be able to quickly see what ultimately helped. Thanks.]

Similar problem with flash drive - no luck with software listed

I noticed your post and noticed you didn't receive feedback on your suggestions.

I had a similar problem to the one described in the original post. My flash drive quit working. Both my Windows pc and my Mac recognize the drive as a USB flash drive, but both also report that it needs to be formatted.

I have not formatted it yet. I'm still hoping to be able to recover the data on it.

I tried the software you listed but no luck. Most of the software packages you recommended saw the drive but none could find anything to recover.

I unfortunately had just copied some business files onto it that I'd like to recover. I was hoping to do it myself without sending it somewhere for recovery.

I wish I had better news....

Unfortunately, if none of those tools found any files that could be recovered, it would appear that the drive's file system has become corrupt.In which case, the only thing that will possibly make it usable is a reformatting. I recommend you use FAT or FAT32 when formatting a USB memory stick.

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